If you think anything anyone does has to scale to solve problems globally, you’re lying to yourself.
I propose a couple more effective ways to approach what you do.
One way: Imagine that no matter what, nothing you do will influence anyone else. Now what should you do?
A second way: How does this view make any less sense? “I had a dream I was in 1850 Alabama owning slaves. I thought to free them, but realized it wouldn’t change the system, so I didn’t, and didn’t free them. I whipped them instead.”
Logically, it’s the same. It’s stopping harming people. In both cases, living with integrity helps you learn and lead others.
Not the best analogy. Owning slaves is wrong, even if one person in the whole world owns one slave. Flying in an airplane is wrong only because so many of us fly. If thousands of people flew instead of millions, it would not cause harm and would not be wrong. The best solution in this case is for the government to set limits.
It’s tempting to say we, in buying airplane tickets, aren’t like slaveholders, but the comparison for the person buying the airplane ticket isn’t the person owning the slave. Our counterpart in, say, 1800, would be the British person buying the sugar made on a slave plantation or in 1850 buying cotton. The people in the home markets are funding the system of distant slavery. Even if their hands didn’t hold the whip or gun, they are paying for it. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but I don’t see how our hands in buying airplane tickets can be cleaner than than theirs buying sugar and cotton.
In any case, the body count from burning fossil fuels is much greater than slavery. Polluted air kills people on the scale it took the Atlantic Slave Trade centuries to reach, and that’s only one way pollution kills, and that’s small compared to predictions for the near future.
Also extracting fossil fuels, minerals, and other resources for planes, airports, and everything else you need for flying does cause murder, rape, and enslavement.